The Collective (3 page)

“Or,” Joshua said more loudly, “you strictly vanilla? As in boarding-school shiksas, frosty Mayflower mungie cakes, pinkaloid pooty, Ritz cracker chirp-chirp Marshas. Or maybe you prefer the local corn-fed variety, the gopher winkle Triscuits and chalky Betty Crockers and Miracle Whip doozers and tapioca hayseed cream pies.”

By now, everyone in the room had swiveled around and was looking at us.

“I’m sorry,” Joshua said, quite pleased with himself, “was I speaking out of turn?” Then, as a postscript, he told me, “Not that I have anything against white girls, understand. After all, as Kierkegaard once said, pussy is pussy.”

Jessica raised her hand. “Is it too late to transfer to another class?” she asked the professors.

“Ditto for me,” I said.

“Damn,” Joshua said. “Once again, betrayed by Asian nation.”

We were assigned single rooms on the fourth floor of Dupre Hall. Macalester—or Mac, as everyone abbreviated it—was considered a premier liberal arts college, small and selective, with fewer than two thousand students. The campus was pretty and well maintained, and the school itself was rich, its coffers bursting with donations from the founders of Reader’s Digest. Yet Dupre Hall, designated for freshmen and sophomores, was an ugly brick bunker with vertical slit windows, and it was generally acknowledged as the worst dormitory on campus. Dupre—alternately referred to as Duprojects, Duprived, and Duprison—was the only hurricane-proof building on campus, in an area that was not known to have hurricanes. Supposedly the building plans, intended for a coastal location, had been available at a discount. The single rooms in Dupre indeed felt like a prison, so narrow that the beds had to be lofted on stilts, with the desks and dressers directly underneath. There was a rumor that Macalester had to pay a fine to the state every year because the rooms violated a human-rights code, not meeting the minimum legal size for juvenile detention cells.

Joshua was on one end of the fourth floor, the smokers’ end, and Jessica and I were on the other. I was curious why we’d been given singles, unusual for freshmen, and not doubles or even triples.

“You’re complaining? You wanted a roommate?” Jessica asked.

“I wouldn’t have minded.” I had a sister, Rebecca, who was four years older, and no other siblings. She had left for college when I was entering the ninth grade, and consequently I’d gone through high school feeling like an only child. I would have welcomed the company of a roommate.

“It’s going to be claustrophobic enough around here,” Jessica told me.

She was right. The orientation schedule was chock-full of activities that weekend, everything emphasizing community: lots of meetings and group sessions and pep talks, tours, picnics, resource fairs, advising appointments, dances, and talent shows. Parents had been invited to participate in the festivities. Naturally, all three of us had asked our parents not to come, but Joshua’s were the only ones who complied. While Jessica and I grudgingly escorted our parents around the campus, Joshua sat in the quad, leaning against a tree and listening to his Walkman CD while he smoked and read a novel or scribbled in a notebook.

We were encouraged to sign up for as many student organizations as possible, and there was a dizzying number to choose from. We could join the newspaper, the student government, clubs for minorities, civic engagement, and international relations. We could join clubs with political or religious affiliations, clubs for artists and musicians, for feminists and queers, for bicycling and other athletic pursuits.

There were sports teams at Mac, even a football team, but they weren’t entities of much importance. There were no athletic scholarships, so not surprisingly the teams were perennial losers. No one ever wanted to be identified as a jock, a pejorative term on campus. Pointedly, there was no Greek system, no fraternities or sororities, the school much too progressive for any of that nonsense.

The only things I was truly interested in were the literary magazine and Ultimate Frisbee, the latter because all summer, knowing Frisbee was popular at Mac, I had been practicing, able now to throw sidearm with two fingers and overhand with a wrist flip. I had wanted to be good, competent, at something upon arrival. I ended up, however, joining two other organizations—Amnesty International and Habitat for Humanity—because I saw Jessica Tsai going to their tables and signing up. Joshua, of course, abstained entirely.

“I’m not a joiner, man,” he told me in the dining hall. “This group-participation shit is driving me crazy. I mean, what happened to developing the individual, to encouraging subversion and independence? I thought that’s what this place was all about. Instead, it’s, you know, just the old bourgeois concept of togetherness—i.e., conformity—under the guise of PC liberalism. It’s fucking oppressive, man. It’s downright totalitarian.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said. Truthfully, I appreciated the intimacy of Macalester. In high school, and in Southern California in general, I had felt lost, merely another Asian American kid among the multitudes.

“Let me ask you something,” Joshua said. “Who do you read? Who are your favorite writers?”

At one of the orientation meetings, we had been forced to reveal our career aspirations, and it turned out that all three of us wanted to be artists—Jessica a painter, Joshua and I novelists, the latter a coincidence that immediately distressed me.

I set down my fork. “I don’t know,” I said. “Cheever? Updike, maybe. Chekhov. Fitzgerald.”

“Jesus, how’d you get to be such a fucking Twinkie? Chekhov’s okay, but the rest of those guys are just WASP apologists.”

“What about you? Who do you read?”

“Pynchon, Nabokov, Kundera, Joyce. DeLillo, Rushdie, Hawkes. Calvino, Dostoyevsky, Barth. Coetzee. Bernhard.”

“I like all of those,” I said, although I hadn’t read many of them, much less heard of some.

“Wait a minute,” Joshua said. “Did you come here because Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul? Is that it? It is, isn’t it?”

I felt myself warming. I had already visited the house on Laurel Avenue where F. Scott Fitzgerald had been born and the ones on Summit Avenue where he had lived.

“I knew it,” Joshua said. “You’re a romantic. God, I’m going to have to look after you, Eric, make a special project of you the next four years, because if you take that shit out into the world, that kind of fucking idealism, you’ll get slaughtered. You’ll get creamed. It’ll be the death of you.”

I kept hearing a church bell ring. I’d be in my dorm room or the library and hear the bell, and I’d look at my watch, thinking it must be the top of the hour or a quarterly increment thereof. But the clanging appeared random, occurring anytime, most often at night or in the wee hours of the weekend.

“What the hell is that?” I asked Joshua one evening. We were sitting in the fourth-floor study lounge of Old Main, both reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for the Vietnam War class.

“Oh, you don’t know?” he said with a smirk.

“Know what?”

He dog-eared the page he was on and led me to the window. “Look across to Weyerhaeuser.”

It was dark, but I could see a few lights outside Weyerhaeuser Hall, across the quad, where a couple was gamboling on the sidewalk, skipping and giggling and kissing.

“Ever notice the bell there?” Joshua asked.

I had, now that he mentioned it. Next to Weyerhaeuser Hall, there was a small gazebo with an old church bell hanging inside of it.

“It’s a tradition here,” Joshua said. “You lose your virginity on campus, you ring the bell.”

“All these people were virgins?” I asked. This did not seem like a school of erstwhile prudes. Then again, there were a lot of dorky students at Mac, teenagers who in high school had likely been unpopular and excluded from the active coital roster.

“No, no. It’s when you lose your on-campus virginity,” Joshua said, “your first sexual liaison here, not necessarily the first time you’ve ever glazed the donut.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not a virgin, are you?”

“What?”

“Have you buttered the muffin? Dipped the corn dog? Ridden the wiki wiki all the way to tuna town?”

“Of course I have.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Eleventh grade.”

“What was her name?” he asked, testing me.

“Leigh Anne Wiatt.”

“Ah, you see? I was right about you. A baekin. Addicted to mayonnaise.”

“What’s a baekin?”

“You’re such a banana,” he said—a.k.a. Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. “It’s just disgraceful you don’t know Korean.”

We had had this argument already. Like many third-generation Asian Americans, I had resisted learning Korean as a kid, not exactly ashamed of my ethnicity (though there was some of that), but wary of being defined solely by it. Unlike my sister, I didn’t take Korean lessons on Saturday mornings at the Garden Grove church my parents attended, and eventually I stopped going to services on Sundays as well. Most of my friends in Mission Viejo had been white or Chicano, and I was probably more familiar with Mexico’s culture and history than Korea’s.

Joshua’s Korean, on the other hand, was quite passable. He had left Pusan at five, but in high school, when his memory of the language was beginning to dim, he retaught himself Korean with books and tapes. He also enrolled himself in Hebrew classes, much to the befuddlement of his atheist, anti-Zionist parents. He knew a lot about his homelands, was proud of his split (tripartite?) heritage. The Seoul Olympics were taking place during the start of our first semester, and, watching broadcasts, he rooted for the Koreans first and the Israelis second over the Americans. He called himself a “Kew,” and joked that Koreans and Jews had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they both begot a disproportionate number of classical musicians, both feared and were reviled by black people, and both tried to inundate Harvard with their progeny. He was always complaining he couldn’t find kimchi or a decent bagel in St. Paul.

In many ways, our quick friendship was a surprise. In coming to Mac, I had thought my ethnicity might work in my favor, sort of as a reverse exoticism, a radical chicness, that would redound well, especially with the girls. I worried that hanging out with other Asian Americans would lessen my distinctiveness and I might be stereotyped. And the last thing I needed was someone constantly harping on me that I wasn’t Korean or Asian enough. But Joshua, for all his insistent Asianness, was, well, cool. He was putatively brilliant, always with a bon mot or clever rejoinder at the ready, he wanted to be a writer, and he seemed well versed in all manner of things to which I was not yet completely privy, like sex.

“So,” he said in the study lounge, “was it serial mambo with this chick Leigh Anne, or was it a one-off?”

“A one-off.”

“She’s the only one you’ve ever schtupped?”

“Yeah,” I said forlornly, and it almost had not counted. I’d barely had time to put on the condom and jab myself inside her (where the hell was the entrance?) before I had ejaculated. Little wonder Leigh Anne hadn’t seemed very interested in going out with me again.

“You need to get cracking, old sport.”

“I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience.”

“You suppose right,” Joshua said, although I would learn later that he was lying, that at that moment he was still a virgin, on campus and otherwise.

During the next few days, I became increasingly disconcerted every time I heard the Weyerhaeuser bell. The whole idea of it bothered me, that all these kids had already paired off and were rutting in their dorm rooms, and then broadcasting their new sexual status to the campus. Instead of a celebration, it seemed more like a taunt. To my ears, the bell began to acquire a competitive tenor, a challenge to join the initiated. It seemed, all of a sudden, imperative that I get laid and be able to ring that fucking bell myself.

The first partner in flagrante delicto I considered was Jessica Tsai. My visceral attraction to her was somewhat mysterious to me, since, as Joshua had guessed, up to that point I had been almost exclusively partial to white girls, in particular blondes. Leigh Anne Wiatt, for example, had not been exceptionally pretty. It would have been fair to have described her as plain, verging on homely. Yet she had been blond.

Jessica gave no indication she might be amenable to participating in my campaign. In fact, she was proving to be very elusive. I’d figured out her schedule—when she’d wake up, walk across Grand Avenue to her classes, when she’d be getting out and perhaps going to the library or the student center—and I tried to bump into her as often as possible.

One Wednesday morning, I stepped out into the hallway of Dupre, holding my dopp kit, just as she was heading to the shower in her white silk bathrobe.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

Jessica regarded me without expression. “How long you been working on that?” she said, then flipped her towel over her shoulder and brushed past me.

Days—I’d been working on that line for days.

I finally had a chance to corner her the next week, when I sat beside her on the bus to Dayton’s Bluff, where we were going to renovate a house for Habitat for Humanity. We’d just finished midterms, and we compared grades. She had received all A’s, and I’d gotten—typical for me, despite my prodigious efforts—mostly B-pluses.

“How’d Joshua do?” she asked.

“B-ish,” I said, which had shocked me until I found out that he sometimes did not hand in all of his assignments. He was bright, but lazy.

I told Jessica I’d once asked Joshua why he hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t even apply. With his off-the-chart SAT scores and as a legacy applicant, with his parents (one of whom was an alum) both professors there, he would have surely gotten in. “I thought I should learn some humility,” he’d told me, “mingle with the little people.”

“Like us?” Jessica asked.

“No doubt.”

“He’s always had it so easy,” she said. “He’s been coddled. An only child, an adopted child. You know what my father did the day I was born? He sent out for applications to Harvard and Yale. He was crushed I didn’t get into an Ivy.”

Her parents had immigrated to Flushing, New York, from Taiwan, and it took many years before her father’s English was proficient enough to pass the intensive three-part exam for his optometry license. In the meantime, he had slogged away as a lab technician at LensCrafters, and Jessica’s mother had worked in a Korean nail salon. Every day, they had reminded Jessica and her two younger sisters that they were in America for one purpose and one purpose only: so their children could attend the best universities in the world.